Bottle Rockets – Hell of a spell
Back at his parents’ home in Festus, Missouri, Henneman was getting their estate in order, trying to keep up with soaring gas bills during the winter months. He played a few solo shows, “just to make a little money, and have some fun, to escape from the horrors of the domestic nightmares that were going on,” he remembers. “It was a bad time. I also started writing some songs again, but it took a long while before I did.”
“Mom & Dad”, fittingly, broke the ice. “That’s the first song I wrote after that whole scene. It just fell out of the damn guitar; I sat down and there it was. Normally anytime I write a song, I’ll come up with some lyrics and then go back and edit it and change it, and tweak it a little bit. But I just let that one alone. However long that song is, is how long it took to write down.”
Around the same time, inspiration arrived on the wings of another recently departed soul. Between the deaths of Henneman’s mother on November 12 and his father on December 26, one of the band’s foremost musical influences, Doug Sahm, had died on November 18, 1999. One night, Henneman and guitarist Tom Parr were sitting around on Henneman’s front porch having a few beers, and the conversation turned to Sahm.
“I was talking about how nobody had done the Doug Sahm tribute record that I thought they should have,” he recalls. “And then Tom and me, in a drunken fit, decided, well, let’s just do it ourselves, we’ll do the whole thing. It was just a drunken, stupid, boisterous thing.
“And then I told Mark about it, and he put it into action. He called Bloodshot [the renowned Chicago label for which the band had recorded a few compilation tracks over the years], and they said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’
“I think from the time we dreamed it up, to the finished, turned-in product with artwork, was six weeks. It was just this great, great thing. It slingshotted us right back into the groove.”
Recorded with fellow Missourian Lou Whitney at his studio in Springfield, Songs Of Sahm — released in February 2002 on Bloodshot — was indeed just the kind of shot in the arm the Bottle Rockets needed to resurrect themselves. Artistically, it’s somewhat uneven; Henneman’s vocal range isn’t quite the right fit for Sahm’s melodies, though the band addressed that in part by having Kearns take the lead on several songs. Regardless, there’s no denying the righteousness of spirit that went into the recording, and the love they show for their mentor and his material.
Sahm’s songs became a part of their lives largely on account of their old friend from Festus, Scott Taylor, who had moved to town in 1978 to teach English at the Catholic high school that Ortmann and Parr attended. (Henneman went to a public school in neighboring Crystal City but was friends with Parr and his older brother, Bob.)
“One day, in my first year there, I heard Bob talking with another guy about the Ramones,” Taylor recollects. “It was still unusual in 1978 to hear somebody talking about the Ramones, particularly in more rural areas….I started talking with them about different music and stuff, and playing them records that I had.”
One day, he played them a Sir Douglas Quintet album. “The minute I heard that, I said, ‘That’s the ultimate music right there,'” Henneman told Miles of Music’s online publication MoMzine last year. “Everything I enjoyed about music was right there on that one album, Mendocino. It’s still my favorite.”
Among the first shows they did to promote the Songs Of Sahm disc was a Bloodshot Records showcase in March 2002 at the South By Southwest festival in Austin, Sahm’s longtime home turf. Everything was primed for the Bottle Rockets’ triumphant return from their extended hiatus — when, suddenly, the night before the show, all hell broke loose.
A brief report in a post-SXSW wrap-up that ran in the Raleigh-Durham area Independent weekly recapped what happened as follows: “Brian Henneman and Tom Parr…got in a brawl in a taxi in downtown Austin before their showcase gig. Making the cab pull over, the two frontguys let loose with ’15 years of pent-up resentment’ and were ‘rolling over cars’ and dukin’ it out in a scene straight out of The Rockford Files. That night, Henneman announced to the soundman, ‘Your job just got a little easier’ — they’d shrunk to a three-piece (Parr flew home).”
Though a couple of the details in that blurb might have been slightly askew or exaggerated, it was a more or less accurate account of what had gone down. This was a major blow, as Henneman and Parr had been playing music together since before the Bottle Rockets had begun, dating back to its precursor band, Chicken Truck.
Henneman prefers not to talk about the incident. “We’ll just let that dog lie,” he says, adding only, “I haven’t seen him” since it happened. “He lives in my neighborhood and I still haven’t seen him.”